In the days after Mount St. Helens first erupted—sending some 540 million tons of ash over an area of 22,000 square miles—WSU ecology professor Richard “Dick” Mack was already thinking of its potential research value. “It wasn’t research that I intended to do,” Mack says, “but there was a unique opportunity and it would be […]
Wherever we find a volcano on the surface of our planet, we can find the source of an eruption beneath it. That’s what I found out from my friend John Wolff, a volcanologist at Washington State University in Pullman. Our planet is home to all kinds of volcanoes that erupt in different ways. Some eruptions are […]
WSU geologists have found a new way to estimate how fast magma is recharging beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano. Scientists now have a better understanding of a key factor of what’s underneath the massive caldera: a pool of basalt magma continually recharging the system. “It is the coal in the furnace that’s
The Pacific Northwest was home to one of the Earth’s largest known volcanic eruptions, a millennia-long spewing of sulfuric gas that blocked out the sun and cooled the planet, Washington State University researchers have determined. “This would have been devastating regionally because of the acid-rain effect from the eruptions,” said John Wolff, a professor in the […]